How to use Claude Cowork as a Competitive Intelligence System

🧠 Build strategy decks, analyze UI, craft tailored stakeholder updates with plugins. An in-depth but simple guide to Claude Cowork and the essentials worth knowing about. Knowledge Series #99

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Claude Cowork and its plugins were the catalyst for the so-called “SaaSpocalyse” last week where investors decided that Anthropic’s latest tools were set to play a major role in the destruction of SaaS as we know it.

Most tech leaders disagree. This week, Sam Altman said “it’s definitely not dead” and Arm’s CEO called it “micro-hysteria”. Anthropic’s CEO, though, has warned that up to 50% of white-collar entry level jobs could be displaced by AI within the next 1-5 years.

But whatever you think about the future of SaaS and the impact of AI, in this Knowledge Series, we’re going to take a closer look at Claude Cowork to understand what it is, how it’s different to Claude Code and what you can actually do with it based on its current capabilities today.

Claude Cowork is powerful in part because it can create artifacts like Excel spreadsheets, Documents and Powerpoint presentations in just a few minutes. Not only that, it can also access your browser to visit specific websites, synthesise its findings and save them for you to review later. This is extremely powerful for product teams but getting set up can be a little bit overwhelming.

We’ll work through some hands-on examples together without too much information overload or complexity which can often be the case with some other guides, so that you’re able to get some solid experience without adding too much complexity to your existing every day workflows. Our examples will focus on the concept of building a competitive intelligence system which includes visiting competitor websites and analyzing their pricing, critiquing their UI, synthesizing your findings and crafting a short stakeholder update you can share in Slack using Claude’s official product-management plugin.

Coming up:

• What is Claude Cowork and what can it do?

• How is it different from existing Claude products? The core pieces explained

• Hands-on examples: how to use Claude Cowork for competitive intelligence tasks including:

  • Analyze the price of competitors with Claude in the browser

  • Critique the UI of competitors

  • Transform your strategic work into a Powerpoint deck

• How to use the official Cowork product management plugin with pre-built Skills and slash commands: use the /stakeholder-update slash command to send a Slack-formatted update of your work

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The Knowledge Series

What is Claude Cowork?

Claude Cowork was released earlier this year in part as a reaction to the popularity of Claude Code. After the release of Claude Code, Anthropic said that they were amazed by how many non-engineers were using it for non-technical tasks and so they decided to release a separate product that is specifically focused on work - and doesn’t require users to use the terminal which can be a little off-putting.

Here’s a snapshot of Claude Cowork and its capabilities:

Claude Cowork is designed to work slightly differently to Claude’s other core products. Instead of just chatting with it, the product is designed for users to delegate work to it.

It works best when it’s given descriptive, specific tasks to work on with clear outcomes. For example:

“Create a quarterly sales report for Q4 2024 as a PowerPoint presentation. Include slides for: executive summary with key metrics (revenue, growth %, top performers), regional breakdown comparing Americas/EMEA/APAC performance, product category analysis showing our top 5 products, and a trends slide highlighting what changed vs Q3. Use our sales data from the Q4_sales_raw.xlsx file in my Downloads folder. Make it professional with charts and keep it under 15 slides”

A quick (but probably overly simplistic) mental model to think about for each of the core Claude products is this:

• Claude Chat = the standard version of Claude

• Cowork = a co-worker you delegate work to who also operates your work life (with some caveats)

• Claude Code = a CTO who writes code

Claude Code can actually do all three of these which makes it particularly powerful but the terminal interface can often feel a little restrictive. With Cowork, you’re working with Claude through the desktop app on a Mac and will need to switch to Cowork mode to get started.

What can Cowork actually do?

Right now, Claude Cowork works locally on your machine and is predominantly used for creating and editing artifacts that you can use at work. We’ll take a look at some of the ways product teams can use these shortly, but before that, here’s some of the most important capabilities to know about.

Context aware file organization

Unlike basic file management tools that only read filenames, Cowork actually opens and reads file contents to understand what you’re working with.

When you point Cowork at a messy folder of research materials, meeting notes, screenshots, and PDFs, it reads through each document to understand the content. It then intelligently renames files with descriptive labels, categorizes them by theme or project, and documents every organizational decision it makes so you can review its logic later.

Document creation with native Skills for Excel, Powerpoint and Docs

Cowork comes with an initial set of built-in skills that improve Claude’s ability to create documents, presentations, and other files Claude. These include skills for creating:

• Excel spreadsheets (.xlsx) with working formulas

• PowerPoint presentations (.pptx)

• Word documents (.docx)

• PDF files

These skills enable it to generate Excel spreadsheets with working formulas, multiple sheets, and charts that update automatically when you change the data. It creates PowerPoint presentations with proper slide layouts, built-in design themes, and speaker notes and more.

This capability alone can save product teams hours of formatting work, particularly when synthesizing research findings or preparing stakeholder updates.

Browser automation

Using the Claude-in-Chrome extension, Cowork can control your browser to navigate websites, click elements, extract data, and interact with web applications you’re already logged into.

This means it can do things like visit competitor pricing pages, read through documentation sites, access internal dashboards, and compile findings automatically. The results right now are a bit hit and miss but in my experience the Chrome extension was still able to perform some helpful tasks for product teams like visiting specific websites, analyzing them and synthesizing its findings.

Connectors

Cowork integrates with your existing work tools through pre-built connectors for Gmail, Google Calendar, Notion, Asana, Slack, and more. These integrations allow Cowork to access data directly from these tools and incorporate it into the documents and analyses it creates.

Last week, Anthropic also released the ability to connect Cowork to your Google Drive.

Currently, this integration only works with Google Docs up to 10MB in size, and Claude can only see the main text content - no images, comments, or suggested edits. Documents are synced directly from Google Drive, which means if you edit a doc later, Claude will automatically use the latest version in future sessions.

Plus, you can now connect your Slack channels to Claude to draft messages, send messages and create canvases that can be shared in specific channels.

Hands-on Guide - How product teams can use it

OK, now that we’ve taken a look at its core capabilities, let’s move onto some of the ways product teams can actually use them.

We’ll look at 4 distinct use cases:

1. Analyze the price of competitors with Claude in the browser and transform its findings into a Powerpoint deck

2. Critique the UI of competitors taking on the role of a Senior Product Designer and document findings

3. Use the official Claude Product Management plugin with slash commands to create stakeholder updates formatted as a Slack message in a few minutes

4. Turn your workflow into an automated system that you can use whenever you need it

Getting set up